An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture
'When shall the Culture descend from on high?' (cultural theorist, Mladen Dražetin)
(By Roger Scruton) (1998) This is great fun and contains plentiful pearls of wisdom, but the pearls remain scattered over the floor – there is no golden thread herding them into finished or coherent form. High culture is venerated, low culture ridiculed, but Scruton is not able to extol culture as a bridge over the river that has washed faith away, to obtain high, dry, clear ground, on the other side from enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism, kitsch, deconstruction, etc., etc. He seems, actually, jaundiced – far too doctrinaire for our good. Skip the early definitional chapters, I would, and immerse yourself in the…
Continue Reading →Our Mother’s House
(Dir. Jack Clayton) (1967) This is a film of definite morbid interest, the kind of dark, small, quiet, quintessentially English film we’ve come to expect from Dirk Bogarde. Here he is the totally useless dad, Charlie Hook, who answers a letter from one of his children (at least, we think it’s his), living together (all eight of them), in their late mother’s house. What happened to mum? Well, she was ill and passed on, you see, “gone to join Jesus,” so naturally they buried her in the garden. And continue cashing her welfare cheques. Their scheme to ‘carry on’ is subverted…
Continue Reading →Wuthering Heights
(by Emily Brontë) (1847) It is, maybe, the greatest novel of them all: passionate; intransigent, mystical, sui generis. Wuthering Heights is where heaven and hell combine, and it outdoes either. It is mythical, whilst at the same time, prosaically real. It is made eternal by the art of Emily Brontë, and her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine, whose afterlife-marriage stoked the fires of romanticism that still flicker in our post-modern age. (Indeed, is Heathcliff the Humbert Humbert of that earlier age? As Joyce Carol Oates observed, “Heathcliff’s true bride is Death.”) He is a cruel man, with some reason, but he develops humanity of a sort over the course…
Continue Reading →“The Greatest Fightback Since Gunga Din”
"I might rest on some laurels after that."(painting by Ramon Marti-Alsina, Montserrat)
1986 Escort Cup: Glenelg 12.7 (79) Sturt 11.12 (78) Whilst the Tigers had had a lot of footy, this March night (more like a slow Tuesday evening than the weekend, or so it seemed) they looked more than tired – they looked bored. It was the off-season competition, in front of 5,000 odd fans. At quarter time, Sturt led 2.3 to 1 goal; at half time, the Double Blues led 6.4 to 2.4, but in the third quarter, Sturt kicked 5.5. to zip, to lead by 59 points. Willmott at full forward had kicked twice as many goals on…
Continue Reading →Bennie and the Jets
Songs in Our Heart # 8 Bennie and the Jets (Elton John) (Written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin; released October 1973) [First chord – confected applause – stylish stuttering – electric boots.]*
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